West Ham United Foundation

Background

West Ham United’s community department has been providing opportunities, creating pathways and changing lives in east London for 25 years. To mark this milestone, the Club have re-launched the operation as the West Ham United Foundation, which is now looking ahead to sustaining its impact
over the next decade and beyond.

We joined forces with Future Proof CIC for this project. While they led on the creation of the Foundation’s new community sport strategy we developed the storytelling format, linking the words and targets developed by Future Proof to the images and styling that brings the whole piece to life.

The Brief

The Foundation wanted to look back over 25 years of supporting communities in east London, across the UK and around the world. They wanted to change the landscape of community sport so we looked at their history for context, their current performance for relevance and their future plans to create direction.

The new strategy was to be launched at a Parliamentary reception hosted by Steven Timms, MP for East Ham, designed to demonstrate the work of the Club locally and to engage representatives from organisations like The Premier League to discuss how collectively they can change the landscape of community sport.

The brochure would need to stay within the Club’s brand guidelines but find interesting ways to present the facts and figures that baldly tell the story of the Foundation’s success over the past two-and-a-half decades alongside their plans for the next 10 years.

Execution

Future Proof worked with the Foundation to find out just what matters most to them, and just how they saw their 2026 vision developing. Understanding the opportunity presented by the move to the Olympic Park was critical as was talking to key partners to capture their expectations of this mighty Premier League club.​

Our first step was a thorough understanding of the Club’s brand guidelines, to understand the style in which the brochure would be presented. This understanding was vital for embedding the identity of the Club in the brochure from the first draft and ensuring that it aligned with other brand materials.

Debatably the most important consideration in creating the brochure was how it would convey the narrative of the Foundation’s success to this point, not only through copy, but through the facts and figures researched by Future Proof that evidenced its impact in the community. Accordingly we used design to elevate the bare numbers, creating infographics to draw attention toward the story they told.

At the core of this process was the timeline of the Club from its inception, through the formation of the community operation, to the present day. To bring the chronology to life, we created bespoke icons to encapsulate each step in visual form, communicating the Club’s rich footballing heritage alongside the growth of its community operation in an eye-catching way.

Result

The Club received a brochure that brought the success of the Foundation to life and gave it a
platform from which it could tell its story and outline its future. Feedback saw Foundation held up a leading example of how to make a difference to communities through sport by the Premier League and we were delighted to build upon our initial work by designing the Foundation’s updated brochure for 2016/17.

“I can’t thank you enough for such an excellent job. It was exactly what we wanted and will drive forward so much of our development. The best part of the project was discovering how the narrative was to be presented; you showed a great understanding of our work and made this process very easy. I hope we can work together on projects in the future and once again thank you for your support.”